Having no luck with back ups

[pstonier]

Help! Help! Help!

 

 

 

I've been trying to do back-ups for 24 hours with no luck.

 

 

 

It all started last night when my Sony Viao started making a whirring sound. I called Sony and they advised doing a full back up as soon as possible.

 

 

 

I had done a back-up of my Vaio a couple of months back using Retrospect Express 5.6, to a La Cie external 40 gig drive. I could have done an incremental back-up, but instead I went down the slippery path to computer pain.

 

 

 

Here's what I did. I had been thinking about partitioning the drive, since my backup was only about 2 gigs (due to compression). That way, I thought, I would save to a 4 gig or so partition, and still be able to use the rest of the drive for other things. Thus I reformatted the disk erasing all data and tried partitioning. It soon learned that I couldn't simply create a 4 gig and a 36 gig partition. DOS won't allow it. Either it's sliced up into 10 units of 4 gigs or you don't parition. Fine, I abandoned the idea and then here's what happened:

 

 

 

I reformatted the disk again using my Windows ME format utility (This was a "full" format). I then ran a back-up. The strangest thing happened. Even though, once compressed, my data was only two gigs - 19 Retrospect data files were created on the hard drive, each about two gigs -- completely filling up the whole disk! I looked at the catalog information for my backup. It said only one 2 gig back-up was executed!

 

 

 

I tried a second time. I did a full reformat again. The disk was emptly. This time, just as the back-up was starting, I opened the window for the La Cie disk. The back-up had only been running a few minutes and already, according to "properties" the disk was completely full again !!!! Again, there were 19 data files of 2 gigs or so each!

 

 

 

I tried three other strategies:

 

 

 

1) I created a "new back-up", this time choosing the file rather than external drive option. I then tried again from scratch, having reformatted the external hard drive. I got a message saying there wasn't enough space on the destination disk to create the back-up. I think this was because the file back-up wanted to copy to a second partition on my Vaio hard drive rather than to the external drive.

 

 

 

2) I then tried to do a CD-RW back-up. I got a message saying the disk I put in my CD-Drive was unreadable, even after erasing. This was true even though I was able to use Adaptec CD creator to back-up files to the very same CD disk.

 

 

 

3) My final recourse was to reformat the La Cie external drive one more time and duplicate. This is running right now on another computer in the house. This finally seems to be working!!

 

 

 

Some questions: a) Any idea why when I run a regular back-up I would get 19 files filling up the whole 40 gig drive rather than one two gig file? Why would perfectly good CD-RW disks be rejected by Retrospects back-up utility? c) Is it possible to specify a destination for a "file" back-up (file as opposed to external drive, tape, and CD-RW). It would be great to be able to use this option for my 40 gig hard drive so I could use the remaining room for other purposes.

 

 

 

Thank you for you help!!!!

 

 

 

Peter

[AmyJ]

The type of backup set needed is called a File backup set. From what you've described, you created a Disk backup set, which is designed for backup to removable cartridge drives, such as Jaz, Zip and Orb drives. You should reformat the hard disk, and create a File backup set through Configure > Backup Sets. Run a backup using the new backup set, and you should end up with a single file on your external drive.